Relating the Story of Things

Patricia Allmer

Abstract: The act and practise of relating is a key element in developing narratives. This
essay will explore the interplay and connections between relating and narrating, and the
possibilities of producing alternative narratives, independent from hierarchical structures
located in linearity, causality and genealogy, by exploring what Gilles Deleuze termed
‘involution,’ as an alternative device of relating. This essay will explore and exemplify this,
by focusing on artistic and curatorial strategies of the artist/curators Carson & Miller in the
exhibition The Story of Things. This exhibition’s re-organisation of anthropological and
ethnographic objects challenges the conventional and traditional representation of such
objects in linear and genealogical ways. Curatorial and artistic strategies of display, such as
unconventional juxtapositions, slight shifts of the constituent parts of objects, and
incongruous combinations of them will be examined. The essay will argue that such
strategies are effective in establishing new modes of narrative organisation and new products
of combination and juxtaposition.

Résumé: L'art et la pratique de lier sont des données capitales dans le développement de
n'importe quel récit. Dans cette étude, on voudrait examiner les rapports et le dialogue entre ces
deux aspects (récit et mise en relation), puis s'interroger sur les manières possibles de produire
des formes de récit non classiques, indépendantes des structures hiérarchiques fixées par les
notions de linéarité, causalité et généalogie mais informées par la notion deleuzienne d'involution
comme technique non canonique de mise en rapport. La présente étude compte explorer et
exemplifier cette approche en s'appuyant sur les stratégies artistiques et les choix d'exhibition des
Carson & Miller dans l'exposition The Story of Things. La manière dont cette exposition
réorganise les objets anthropologiques et ethnographiques est un défi aux techniques
conventionnelles et traditionnelles de représentation linéaire et généalogique de ce genre d'objets.
Les choix artistiques et organisationnels qui ont été faits pour exposer les objets, comme par
exemple les juxtapositions non stéréotypées, l'accentuation de certaines parties de l'objet plutôt
que d'autres et les combinaisons apparemment incongrues, seront au cœur de l'analyse. L'article
se propose de démonter que ces stratégies peuvent contribuer efficacement à la création de
nouvelles formes d'organisation narrative et de nouveaux modes de combinaison et de
juxtaposition d'objets.

Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 5

Key words: Anthropology, Deleuze, exhibition, involution, narrative, object, representation

The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped
suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about
stopping herself before she found herself falling down what seemed to be a very
deep well. (Carroll 2)

In 2009 Manchester-based collaborative artists Carson & Miller were invited by

Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections (MMU Special Collections) and the
North West Film Archive (UK) to curate an exhibition exploring the museum and archive’s
varied collections, ranging from pots, toys and Victorian ephemera to scrapbooks and
albums. The exhibition was called The Story of Things. Perhaps this exploration of the
exhibition should start at its beginning. Entering The Story of Things was like entering a
different world, a story, perhaps, although a story of a very strange nature. Arriving in the
dimly lit environment and approaching the different glass cabinets the visitor discovered a
world of the curious and marvellous, drawn together from the different artefacts of the two
collections (see fig. 1). As Carson & Miller state in their introduction to the exhibition, the
curatorial process was built on roaming through the archives and selecting objects in “a
deliberately random and undisciplined journey”, cross-referencing the collections,

Fig. 1: Installation views of The Story of Things (2009). Photography by Tony Richards.
sometimes, as they explain, “relating things by type, sometimes throwing the unlikely
together, sometimes remembering something they already knew, sometimes uncovering
things unknown to them.”

Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 6

 According to Carson & Miller their curatorship turned away from the “academic
study of objects” and “failed the history of art and design tradition” (“in Conversation with”).
Here selection and arrangements (or rather dis-arrangements) were based on contingency – a
word which designates ‘chance’, ‘accident’, ‘a fortuitous happening’, but which also stems
from the Latin word tangere, ‘to touch’, implying ‘con-tact’, connection, affinity. Their
playful approach, and play is a significant part in all their artistic projects, is there to explore
existential questions as well as conventional ideological positions anchored in academic and
curatorial practices.
The title, The Story of Things, mapped out the content of MMU Special Collections
consisting of, on the one hand, significant collections of stories including children’s literature
and artist books, and of ‘things’; a magnificent, weirdly beautiful collection of ephemera,
objects, and, most significantly for Carson & Miller’s project, scrapbooks – books assembled
out of fragments, out of scraps (in the double sense of the word, signifying fragment as well
as something we regard as value-less). Carson & Miller also produced a scrapbook which had
the same title as the exhibition and on which, in the manner of the Moebius strip, the
exhibition was based, just as the scrapbook was itself based on the exhibition. This
scrapbook, the content of which reflects some but not all the contents from the exhibition,
was placed in the exhibition environment – it was part of the exhibition as an exhibit, as well
as separate from it.
The history of the scrapbook can be traced back to Latin society, where students were
instructed in Quintillian’s Instituto Oratorio to record in order to preserve memory on a tablet
known as an album, deriving from the Latin for ‘white’. The recording of private thought for
the purpose of learning developed in the thirteenth century with the introduction of paper.
This early method of preserving knowledge was particularly prominent within the field of art,
evident in Giorgio Vasari’s promotion of the preservation of works of art in albums, a
method which was influential on proto-museums and collections. Later, collectors started to
compile albums of ephemera which often consisted, like James Granger’s 1775 biographical
history of England, of blank pages on which the owner could attach prints – a ‘Grangerised’
book designated a book which consisted of autographs, letters and other printed material
compiled by the owner. The arrival of colour printing and new printing technologies in the
late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries opened the scrapbook up to the general public, who
began to be able to afford cheap and colourful images. Throwaway printed paper artefacts
and ephemera such as tube tickets, advertising cards, visiting cards, postcards and sweet
wrappers came into circulation. Through this, the scrapbook became an inexpensive, and
Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 7
therefore widespread, way of collecting, an essential symbol of a particular configuration of
modernity – of the democratising effects of mechanical reproduction and industrialisation.
The scrapbook is also a celebration of the proliferation of printed matter, typography,
images and their significance in everyday life in modernity, evoking Eugène Atget’s
photographs of Parisian streets plastered with adverts and advertising, as well as André
Breton’s rummaging through the Parisian flea-markets, to find the objet trouvé, the
marvellous encounter between two objects discarded from the circulation of commodities –
the flea-market is full of scraps. The scrapbook also evokes Walter Benjamin’s explorations
of the nineteenth century, which according to him could only be read in its fragments, its
ruins and refuse. The scrap of the scrapbook, like objects at a flea-market, always already
entails in its fixedness the process of becoming ‘memory’, its ruinous state, its pastness, its
exclusion from the mobile circulation of commodities. The scrapbook also draws together the
mass-produced and the singular. It is, as Katherine Ott, Susan Tucker and Patricia P. Buckler
elaborate, a mass-cultural form, but individually each is “unique, authentic, and not easily
reproducible” (12), a mass-cultural product which paradoxically contains the aura of
authenticity.
How we read and work through a scrapbook differs from the way we read printed
books. Linearity threads through the conventional printed book, from cover to cover, from
the beginning of the narrative to its end. Lines and linearity are staple concepts in narrative,
in sequentially numbered pages, the reading mode from left-to-right, from top-to-bottom, the
linearity of the sentences printed, the threading of letter to letter to produce a linear word.
The word text itself comes from Latin textere meaning ‘to weave’, the stringing together of
threads to produce texture. According to J. Hillis Miller, “the linearity of the written or
printed book is a puissant supporter of logocentrism. The writer [ . . . ] sits at a desk and spins
out on the page a long thread of filament of ink. Word follows word from the beginning to
the end. The manuscript is set for printing in the same way, whether letter by letter, by
linotype, or from tape by computer. The reader follows, or is supposed to follow, the text in
the same way, reading word by word and line by line from the beginning to the end” (5).
Indeed, the Greek myth of Ariadne is based literally on a thread – in Greek, the clue – which
allows Theseus to find the way out of the labyrinth, a thread that unravels and drives the
story.
The focus of conventional narratives, novels and stories, woven out of these lines, is
on linearity. Line images suggest or symbolise interpersonal links: filiation, affiliation, family
lines, plots, clues, liaisons, genetic and ancestral lines, passages, loose threads, missing links,
Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 8
copulation, marriage ties, the end of the line. And, of course, genealogy and dominant
Western conceptions of ontology and epistemology are based on linearity, tracing
genealogies and traditions, chronological sequences of before and after, preceding and
succeeding. This was represented in Carson & Miller’s exhibition by a Tree of Life
(see fig. 2), consisting of prayers and moral codes: the tree is here a symbol of all these lines
and affiliations, growing from bottom to top in a linear manner.

Fig. 2: The Tree of Life illustrated sheet hymn, woodblock print in 4 colours.
Printed and published by James Catnach, London (1830-1839). Photography by Tony Richards.

The scrapbook transgresses this linearity. The scrapbook is not read in the Western
linear, orderly manner. No longer is the reading direction from left to right, from top to
bottom. The book here becomes an exploratory space in which one can leaf back and forth
(and some scrapbooks are not even bound) – according to Tucker, Ott and Buckler, in form

Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 9

“many scrapbooks more closely resemble the junk drawer found in kitchens and desks” (12).
Connections are no longer necessarily logical, or chronological, but follow double mental
ordering principles, those of the compiler and the reader. As Tucker, Ott and Buckler suggest:
“scrapbooks are eccentric and idiosyncratic, making them impossible to pick up and read as
one would a published book. The meaning found in any particular scrap depends on the
nimble skills of the reader” (12).
Scrapbooks are sensual, haptic objects. They shift the focus of the conventionally
printed book from text to its textures, cultivating a multi-sensory experience emerging from
the unevenness of the pages, the feel of different materials from different periods, and the
noises and movements these different materials make when a page is turned. Here a haptical
rather than an optical vision is invited. According to Laura U. Marks, one of the main
differences between haptic and optic visuality is that the haptic image “forces the viewer to
contemplate the image itself instead of being pulled into narrative” (163). Haptic vision does
not move in only one direction, but is exploratory, is all-over-the-place, focusing on the
material details rather than the narrative line. These features were also traceable in Carson &
Miller’s exhibition. The sense-making invited here shifted from the conventional exhibition
environment which focuses on genealogical, chronological, biographical or thematically-
organised material, to a different structure of making-sense, to an exploration which left
linear narratives behind, an exploration which became sensory.
The missing of a ‘grand narrative’ in The Story of Things linking all these objects
together allowed the viewer to start relating objects to each other in different ways and to
start relating different stories of these objects. The display evoked and tied into the tradition
of the Wunderkammer (literally translated as ‘chamber of marvels’ and more familiar under
the name ‘cabinet of curiosities’) – a tradition also appropriated by the surrealists. The last
and most famous remnant of the surrealist appropriation of this tradition was André Breton’s
wall display from his office in the Rue Fontaine which consisted of a range of collected,
marvellous, rare and mystical objects brought together with artworks he owned. This wall has
been reassembled and is on permanent display at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
The first cabinets of curiosities were early modern collections in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, assembled by kings, scholars, medics, merchants and apothecaries.
These early cabinets, according to Jan C. Westerhoff, were spaces of “indiscriminate
accumulation of curiosities, rarities, and marvels” (643), where works of art find a place next
to precious stones, (so-called) unicorn horns, clocks and automata, antique statues next to
renaissance medals, stuffed crocodiles, Egyptian mummies, optical devices, crystals and
Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 10
much more. Most importantly in relation to the Story of Things exhibition, albums, the
forerunners of scrapbooks, were part of, and would have been kept in, cabinets of curiosities
– echoed by Carson & Miller’s inclusion of their own and other scrapbooks in the exhibition.
Indeed, the scrapbook is, according to Tucker, Ott and Buckler, “the equivalent of a poor
family’s cabinet of curiosities” (6). These cabinets contained collections which were not
generically specialised, but organised by the pursuit of polyhistorical knowledge articulating
a desire to include every discipline, ranging from art to science. This desire emerged out of
the belief that everything was interconnected, that natural phenomena did not occur in
isolation and could not be understood as isolated phenomena, but were part of a more
universal process where, to grasp a phenomenon fully, the investigator had to analyse it from
a multiplicity of perspectives. As William Ashworth suggested:
To know the peacock . . . , one must know not only what the peacock looks like,
but what its name means, in every language; what kind of proverbial
associations it has; what it symbolises to both pagans and Christians; what other
animals it has sympathies or affinities with; and any other possible connection it
might have with stars, plants, minerals, numbers, coins or whatever. (306)
Different disciplines, science and mysticism were not treated as separate. Art and
natural sciences were not seen as separate. Similarly, in The Story of Things, art, science,
mysticism were no longer separate – medical books shared their space with film clips of
religious rituals, sporting events, Valentine cards and many other fragments of history. The
identities of things loosened here and the value system was similar to the one Malebranche
assigned to cabinets of curiosities, where “nothing has any real worth and where the price
depends solely on imagination, on passion and on chance” (qtd. in Westerhoff 643).
Imagination, passion and chance are the guiding principles of the Wunderkammer.
They were also the guiding and selecting principles of The Story of Things, where curatorial
decisions were based on sensual impulses, as Carson & Miller described the selection and
arrangement decisions, which were based on “being drawn” to objects and to their
constellations with other objects, and on finding the moment in which the objects were, as
Carson & Miller state, “very satisfying in their position” (“in Conversation with”). This
approach was also anchored in the surrealist selection of the objet trouvé and evokes Walter
Benjamin’s exploration of children at play: “[children] bring together, in the artifact produced
in play, materials of widely different kinds in a new, intuitive relationship” (“A Glimpse Into
the World of Children’s Books” 441). This method of assemblage can be characterised, using
Max Ernst’s comment on surrealist methods of disrupting conventions of representation and
Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 11
of display, as “systematic bewilderment” (16) – indeed the exhibition demonstrated that
certain surrealist practices still offer potent ways of challenging grand narratives and
conventions, and offer also fruitful methods to explore objects in a new light.
The exhibition played on the viewer’s expectations of the auratic qualities of objects
and artworks, by utilising the principle of the scrapbook. As is well known, Benjamin
described the aura of artworks, or more broadly speaking of objects in exhibition
environments, as “the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be” (“The Work
of Art” 23), the creation of a figurative distance from the beholder. On one level the aura was
evoked by the exhibition environment in The Story of Things: the glistening glow of the
spotlights, the glass cabinets, and other features of an exhibition environment are there to
highlight and to emphasise the objects, and to foster the auratic distance Benjamin noted.

Fig. 3: Detail of an exhibition cabinet in

The Story of Things (2009).
Photography by Tony Richards.

The objects themselves exhibited auratic qualities. They were often, to contemporary
eyes, strange curios, drawn from the past – for example a penny lick, a notorious 19th century
glass cup on which ice-cream was served and which was a major source of spreading
diseases, as, after licking off the ice-cream, it was returned to the seller who simply reused it,
without washing, for the next customer. Even more contemporary objects were drawn into
this auratic exhibition environment. For example a brooch in the form of lips from the 1980s 1
echoes John Joseph McCole’s description of surrealist objets trouvé as artefacts “deposited

1
Plastic ‘Lips’ brooch and/or ear clip (by Herman Hermsen, 1982)
Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 12
by the recent past yet already so obsolete that they seemed like relics from an extinct,
prehistoric age” (207). Whilst the auratic qualities of the objects were established in these
different ways, their consumption was disrupted, short-circuited, stirred and ruptured in a
variety of ways (not least by collapsing literal distance between objects).
Like Tucker, Ott and Buckler’s description of the scrapbook as resembling a filled
kitchen drawer, “filling space up” (in Conversation with) was also a repeated method of
Carson & Miller, evoking arrangements which surround us in our everyday life and
environment, creating immediacy rather than distance. Carefully and meticulously, things,
often unrelated in conventional curatorial terms, were piled up on each other, were placed on
each other – a ping-pong ball rested on the penny lick (see fig. 3), a tea cup and saucers were
placed on a Ghanaian stool. Things constantly touched and overlapped each other, or used
each other as rests and supports. These methods seemed to disturb the auratic qualities
expected of objects in exhibitions by meddling with their exhibition-value, their self-
contained discreteness, through returning the almost forgotten practical use-value of the
things in two ways: things in the exhibition were no longer detached – they were returned
into a context where they could fit, again, in our everyday household environment, and they
were made use of, rather than purely exhibited: even if the penny lick was no longer used as
an ice-cream holder, its use as a holder was re-introduced by placing a ping-pong ball on it.
Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the viewer of the exhibition was encountering
what Bill Brown termed the object’s “misuse value”, leading him or her back to a primordial
state of exploring and seeing the world: “One must imagine that within the child’s ‘tactile
tryst’ the substantiality of things emerges for the first time, and that this is the condition for
reshaping the material world we inhabit. One must imagine that this experience in the
everyday foretells a different human existence. If the use-value of an object amounts to its
preconceived utility, then its misuse value should be understood as the unforeseeable
potential within the object, part of an uncompleted dream” (Brown 643). The Story of Things
allowed the viewer to explore this unforeseeable potential of objects.
A wealth of these strategies of bewilderment unfolded in the exhibition, involving
placing and misplacing, joining and disjoining, relating objects with and separating them
from each other. For example, a copy of a fifteenth-century putto from 1898 2 was positioned
facing a strange hybridic being. Unrelated objects were brought into strange conjunctions

2
Copy of a fifteenth century putto by the Della Robbia family. By Figli di Guiseppe Cantagalli, enamelled
earthenware (1898).

Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 13

here, not only by turning the putto and the hybridic figure towards each other, but also in the
composition of the hybrid’s body. This being was composed out of a 1920s head (which
originally either served as a doll’s head or a lamp fitting) and a body that was assembled by
Carson & Miller out of a Japanese vase stand, which in turn was placed on a pile of
anatomical and medical books (see fig. 4).

Fig. 4: Installation view of The Story of Things (2009). Photography by Tony Richards.

Another display was brimming full with different containers. The containers were
arranged next to each other in an almost regimental manner evoking the line-up of toy
soldiers. Here a replica of a 16th century Italian majolica jar was settled comfortably next to a
Philippine basketry wallet; a powder box from 1894 faced a coffee jar from the 1960s; an
Egyptian vessel encountered a Japanese miniature teapot and lid. Neither chronology nor
origin was the guiding principle here. The only shared quality seemed to be that these were
containers with lids (or rather with lids removed) evoking a scrapbook’s contents which, as
Tucker, Ott and Buckler suggest, “fracture chronology; events that occurred weeks or
Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 14
decades apart seem, when placed side by side on a page, to happen simultaneously or in
reverse order” (16). The lids of these objects were removed and lined up separately in the
same regimental manner, constructing the objects as incomplete. Whilst conventionally a lid
without its pot (but also a pot without its lid) is seen as scrap, in the exhibition, for once, the
lids themselves became objects in their own right, playing with the viewer’s notion of
completeness and incompleteness – here something fragmented was represented as complete,
whilst something complete was fragmented, again challenging objects’ auratic qualities.
The vessel, in all sorts of shapes and forms, was a recurrent object in the exhibition.
Its most exuberant display was in a cabinet in which a variety of large vessels were brought
together – ranging from nineteenth century vessels from Nigeria to bowls and vessels by
contemporary Western artists. Whilst the display on first impression evoked showcases of
archaeological findings in museums, a closer look revealed smaller vessels placed within
larger ones, transforming the auratic qualities associated with being an exhibit, making these
objects become once again containers, whilst the vessels in the vessels became signifiers of
their own containing potential.
Joining things that don’t originally belong together, separating those which
conventionally are regarded as belonging to each other: these strategies created poetic
rhythms and tensions and unfolded new, unexpected encounters. The things in The Story of
Things transformed into objects of surrealist delight, as Breton described the moment of an
everyday item, a thing, turning into a surrealist object: “A ready-made reality, whose naive
purpose seems to have been fixed once and for all (an umbrella), finding itself suddenly in
the presence of another very distant and no less absurd reality (a sewing machine), in a place
where both must feel out of their element (on an operating table), will, by this very fact,
escape its naive purpose and lose its identity; because of the detour through what is relative, it
will pass from absolute falseness to a new absolute that is true and poetic” (275). The
juxtapositions in the exhibition revealed new links and relations between the objects that
shared and competed for space, fusing with each other, sometimes violently, sometimes
readily, to form new poetic constellations. The ‘things’ in the exhibition became
‘communicating vessels’, mediating and fluctuating between interior vision and exterior fact,
between imagination and the real.
The exhibition also revealed the volatility of meaning assigned to ‘things’. Calling the
exhibition ‘The Story of Things’ emphasises this volatility of meaning. The term ‘thing’ is at
once both entirely unspecific and yet totally specific. As Bill Brown explains, the word
‘things’ holds within it an “audacious ambiguity [ . . . ] it denotes a massive generality as well
Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 15
as particularities” (4). Brown gives an example from Henry James’ The Spoils of Poynton:
“Things were of course the sum of the world; only, for Mrs. Gereth, the sum of the world was
rare French furniture and oriental china” (49). Another good example of the ambiguity of the
word ‘thing’ is located in a conversation in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland where a
mouse does not want to specify what the Archbishop found:
“Found what?” said the Duck.
“Found it,” the Mouse replied rather crossly: “of course you know what ‘it’
means.”
“I know what ‘it’ means well enough when I find a thing”, said the Duck: “it’s
generally a frog or a worm. The question is, what did the archbishop find?”
(Carroll 10)
Carson & Miller noted that in The Story of Things, things were “misused for play”
(“in Conversation with”). Play marked the exhibition on a number of levels, not least in
Carson & Miller’s play with curatorial conventions and with the viewer’s expectations. Play
was present in the range of toys and games on display, from teddies to puzzles, riddles and
rebuses; from skittles to table tennis sets, from gambling to games of love. People were
shown during play – a clip of a home-made film showed a man losing his artificial moustache
during play-acting, marking the moment where play slips back into reality 3; another clip
showed a humorous reversal of roles in which firemen become involved in a water fight with
each other whilst an appalled child looks on4. Playing also marked Carson & Miller’s ways
of investigating and arranging the objects, evoking childhood memories of building and
constructing things. Perhaps what we witnessed in this exhibition was the outcome of two
people playing games with things and playing games with each other. Here display
transformed into play.
Rules and instructions were recurring motifs in this playful environment. An artist’s
book entitled Rule Book 5 was positioned at the centre of the display of lid-less containers, as
if to warn of the transgressive nature of the curators’ play; a table-tennis rule book was
tucked into a corner of another display cabinet; there were instructions for how to use love

3
From [Norma’s Birthday Party and Family Get-together], produced by Ernest W Hart (1940-42).
4
From Holiday Snapshots Part 1, produced by Mr Smith (1934-44).
5
Rule Book by Angela Bulloch, with design by Florian Pumhösl.Commissioned by Stefan Kalmár as part of

Book Works Projects/Open House 1998-2001. Published by Book Works, London (2000).

Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 16

tokens, and woodblock prints detailed ‘female etiquette of making tea’; in another case
Daedalus’s instructions to Icarus – not to fly too close to the sun or too close to the water –
were counterpointed with an image of Peter Pan, who rejected rules and regulations, flying
away with Wendy. Carson & Miller’s scrapbook alluded to other rules and instructions: there
were instructions on ‘how to use a scrap-book’ folded into the pages, whilst we were
reminded through the reproduction of a set of story-telling cards, showing the story of Red
Riding Hood (see fig. 5), of what happens if we ‘run off the path’. And of course, rules and
instructions are key aspects of the organisation of an archive, or a collection.

Fig. 5: Page from Scrapbook (the story of things) (2009)

These citations of rules and regulations counter-pointed Carson & Miller’s curatorial
game, which could be characterised as what Gilles Deleuze referred to as an ‘ideal game’.
Deleuze exemplifies this ‘ideal game’ by Lewis Carroll’s caucus race in Alice’s Adventures

Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 17

in Wonderland, where one begins when one wishes and stops at will; and with the croquet
match, where the mallets are flamingoes and the balls are hedgehogs which sometimes
simply walk off in the middle of the game – games with no apparent rules, with no winners or
losers; games which no longer correspond to our expectations of games, as Deleuze notes:
“we are not acquainted with games which contradict themselves” (69). If the tree of life, as
well as the rule books, represented the linear, arboreal fixity and rootedness of religion and
symbolise a wider Western ideology of fixity, of seeking genealogy and origination, the play
within the exhibition counteracted this by unfolding the meaning of the object and its
relations as unfixed, rhizomic, shifting, spreading, wandering. Here ‘things’ and their
meanings slipped.
As in other projects by Carson & Miller, such as The Exquisite Fold (2007) a question
and answer game where there is no right or wrong, no winner or loser, in the exhibition the
viewer was transported into a state where order did not matter any longer, where causality
was no longer fixed, where one sometimes easily blurred into or even became the other,
evoking another scene from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “And here Alice began to get
rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way: ‘Do cats eat bats?’ ‘Do
cats eat bats?’ and sometimes ‘Do bats eat cats?’ for you see, as she couldn’t answer either
question, it didn’t much matter which way she put it” (Carroll 3).
The scrapbook as guiding principle of The Story of Things seemed to form what J.
Hillis Miller calls “true disturbances of the [narrative] line that make it curve back on itself,
recross itself, tie itself in knots” (6). Rather than producing an overarching narrative, the
exhibition consisted of a gathering of unfixed stop-starts, of narrative threads laid for the
viewer that they could pick up, play with, carry on or leave behind. The Story of Things was
knotted and doubled in some places, broken and phantasmal in others, seemed sometimes to
bob along a common thread, and, at others, suddenly to bifurcate. The Story of Things then,
may have been of there being no single story.
Scrapbook (The Story of Things) included a reproduction of a puzzle taken from a
scrapbook of games and puzzles, which was also an exhibit in the exhibition. This hand-made
puzzle showed a maze, and was entitled Hunting Ground find the Way from A to B,
demonstrating that the maker of the puzzle had taken great care to draw an intricate, elaborate
network of labyrinthine lines, a Borgesian garden of forking paths, which seemed to tangle
into each other, form and transform into dead ends, knots and wrong turns, turn back on
themselves, or even lead back to the beginning (see fig. 6). Perhaps The Story of Things was
a labyrinth (not necessarily with a way out, though) in which endless stories can be spun,
Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 18
inviting the viewer, following the original meanings of the word ‘maze’, ‘to get lost in our
own thoughts’ and ‘to dream’, to amaze.

Fig. 6: Pages from a notebook of riddles, puzzles and games (date unknown).
Photography by Tony Richards.

"All images are under copyright, © Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections and ©
Carson & Miller. Images are reproduced with kind permission of Manchester Metropolitan University
Special Collections."

Works Cited
Ashworth, Jr., William B. “Natural History and the Emblematic World View.” Reappraisals
of the Scientific Revolution. Eds. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990. 303–32. Print.
Benjamin, Walter. “A Glimpse Into the World of Children’s Books.” Selected Writings 1913-
1926 (Volume I). Eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA &
London:Harvard University Press, 1996. 435-43. Print.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.”
(Second Version). The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and

Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 19

 Other Writings on Media. Eds. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty and Thomas Y.
Levin. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. 19-55. Print.
Breton, André. “Surrealist Situation of the Object” (1935). Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans.
Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press,
255-78. Print.
Brown, Bill. “How to Do Things with Things (A Toy Story).” Critical Inquiry 24.4 (Summer
1998): 935-64. Print.
Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28.1 (Autumn, 2001): 1-22. Print.
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. New York: Cosimo Books, 2010 [1865].
Print.
Carson & Miller. The Exquisite Fold. Manchester: Carson & Miller, 2007. Print.
---. Carson & Miller in Conversation with Patricia Allmer. Manchester
Metropolitan University Special Collections, UK. Nov. 2009. Q&A.
---. Scrapbook (the story of things). Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University
Special Collections, 2009. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles. “Tenth Series of the Ideal Game.” The Logic of Sense. Ed. Constantin V.
Boundas. Trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. London: The Athlone Press, 1990.
69-77. Print.
Ernst, Max. “Beyond Painting.” Max Ernst: Beyond Painting and Other Writings by the
Artist and His Friends. Trans. Dorothea Tanning. New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1948.
16-17. Print.
James, Henry. The Spoils of Poynton. New York: Garland, 1987 [1896]. Print.
Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and The Senses.
Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Print.
McCole, John Joseph. Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition. Ithaca NY: Cornell
University, 1993. Print.
Miller, J. Hillis. Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines. New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1992. Print.
Ott, Katherine, Tucker, Susan and Buckler, Patricia. P. “An Introduction to the History of
Scrapbooks." The Scrapbook in American Life. Eds. Susan Tucker, Katherine Ott and
Patricia P. Buckler. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. 1-28. Print.
The Story of Things curated by Carson & Miller. Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan
University Special Collections, 2009. Print.
Westerhoff, Jan C. “A World of Signs: Baroque Pansemioticism, the Polyhistor and
Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 20
 the Early Modern Wunderkammer.” Journal of the History of Ideas 62.4 (October, 2001):
633-50. Print.

Dr. Patricia Allmer is Senior Research Fellow in Art History & Theory at MIRIAD,
Manchester Metropolitan University. She has recently received a Philip Leverhulme Prize.
Allmer was curator of the award-winning exhibition Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and
Surrealism (Manchester Art Gallery, 28.09.2009 – 11.01.2010), is author of René Magritte:
Beyond Painting (Manchester University Press, 2009) and co-editor of a number of books
and special journal issues on surrealism and art theory. Allmer is currently writing a book
entitled Lee Miller - Beyond Frontiers (Manchester University Press, forthcoming).

Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 21